Deb Norton Tech

This digital storytelling site looks like a great one for students.  I love that students can use their own art work or imported pictures to create the story.  The other neat feature is that students can record their own voice to go with the story. Watch the video to learn more:

Photovisi is a site for making photo collages.  It is as simple as three steps.   #1 choose a collage #2 add photos #3 download the collage to your computer This year our students are going to have ePortfolios and Photovisi will be a neat way to illustrate a project or event.

Communicating Ideas using Posters, Newspapers, and Comics   is a fabulous interactive resource for students. Each interactive teaches about its subject through a neat little animated cartoon and when finished students can use the site’s tools to create their own (poster, newspaper,or comic). I like how the interactive teaches students about the parts of a movie poster, newspaper or comic.  The final product can be printed.   Students cannot save their work. Thank you to KB Konnected for sharing this site.

Remember the magazine Highlights for Kids?     Well, they now have a website.  HighlightsKids.com is a great place for kids to learn, play and explore.  The online version is really fun.  There are Hidden Pictures, Fun Finder, Games and Giggles, Express Yourself, and much more.  I have always been a fan of the Hidden Pictures section.  We plan to use this website this week with our students for bell work.  Check out HighlightsKids.com!

This site comes to me from my colleague, Jen Erickson.  Free Rice is a site where students can answer trivia questions in the areas of English vocabulary, foreign languages, humanities, geography, math and chemistry.   Here's the neat part; for every correct answer 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.  If the student answers incorrectly, the question will be repeated for another chance.  Each time a question is answered correctly, you are shown how much rice you have donated.  The more answers you get correct, the more difficult the questions get.  If you get answers incorrect, the game gets easier.   Check out Free Rice and share it with your students. I would like to thank Jen for sharing this neat site!

Graas is a site that allows you to type a message and then copy a link to share that message with others.  Once you have typed your message, you can change the style, font, background and colors.  I'm sure there are many ways to use Graas with students.   I think it would be neat to have students type a message like this one  click here and then email it to their parents.  This would be a fun way to announce an accomplishment.   Students could also send messages to their classmates or to teachers announcing something special such as this one .  Can you think of other ways to use Graas with your students?  Please share.

Click here for an interactive site that would work great on your Smart Board.  This site is very visual and animated.  I like that there is a ruler to visualize numbers as well as the base ten blocks.  It will help with teaching place value as well. from Learningbox.com

To help our students with organizing their writing I searched my Delicious bookmarks and found several sites that offer graphic organizers that can be downloaded.   Click here Click here Click here Click here Click here (Includes Teaching notes! ) Click here for Readwritethink.org online organizers. We've successfully used some of these with students in the past.   READING ORGANIZERS Many graphic organizers apply to reading comprehension as well as writing. Click here for a really good collection of reading comprehension graphic organizers. (If you know of any other sites that offer graphic organizers, please share.)

The Differentiator is a really nice site for using Bloom's Taxonomy to choose activities for students.   First you choose the thinking skill, then add the content, resources, product and number in each group.  I tried this several times and here are some of the differentiated activities the Differentiator came up with: I suggest giving the Differentiator a try here !

Would you like a way to discover more about your students?  Check out this multiple intelligence survey .  Students answer 4 sets of 10 questions each for a total of 40 questions.  When they are finished with the survey students can print out their results.  (Printers are not currently working on student computers at MPES)  Students can also copy the results code to go back and retrieve their chart at a later date.

Watch this video to see the newest feature for Prezi: templates!

Before we get started with our 1 to 1 computers this year, you may want to use one of the following sites to teach your students about Internet Safety. Safety Land - An interactive city that teaches Internet safety.  Students help the Safety land hero catch a bad Internet character by searching buildings in the city and  answering Internet safety questions. Kidsmart - Covers a wide variety of topics including chatting, networking and file sharing.  Includes videos to help teach the lessons. Webonauts by PBS- Webonauts Internet Academy is a web original game for PBS KIDS GO! that gives kids 8- to 10-year-old an opportunity to have some fun while exploring what it means to be a citizen in a web-infused‚ information-rich world. It is an engaging experience on its own but becomes all the more powerful when parents and teachers use game play as a springboard for conversations about media literacy and citizenship in the 21st Century. Professor Garfiel...

I discovered something fun from Google called Google Shared Spaces .  There are some great spaces to embed or share with others.  Here is one I made called Yes/No/Maybe.  Go ahead and cast your vote. Embedded from Google Shared Spaces. Create your own space. There are several other options which would be fun for students to embed into their own blogs or share by email.  I recommend checking out Google Shared Spaces for your classroom.

Ipicthat is the world’s first free online dyslexic talking picture dictionary, aimed at people who suffer from dyslexia, specific learning difficulties and poor readers. I like that each word in the dictionary has an audio pronunciation that breaks down the sounds.  The tabs on the left offer the dictionary, scenarios (examples are kitchen, street, classroom etc), rules (examples are silent e, long and short vowels, spelling tips etc), and letter sounds (a wheel of the abcs with an image for each letter). See below: Check out this online version of a picture dictionary.

I have been enjoying trying out some of Google's Gadgets that you can add to a Google Spreadsheet and then embed into a site.  I think these will be enjoyable for our students to create  Take a look at the samples and then watch the video to see how this is done! This gadget is called Flash Cards Gadget.  Use the blue buttons to practice the words.  This gadget is called Word Search Gadget.  Find the words and then click and drag over the letters to select the word. This gadget is called Advanced Word Cloud.  It is similar to a Wordle. This gadget is called Bars of Stuff.  It is used to show the numerical value of different items.  You can choose from several options of how to display the bars.  I chose rope for this one. This gadget is called Map.  It shows the location of data you enter into the spreadsheet.   And this gadget is called Word Study Gadget.  It is used to help students study vocabulary and...

Prezi has a new feature.  You can now add 12 different types of diagrams.  This could be a great tool for student presentations!  Watch this You Tube video.

I just finished teaching a session on digital media.  There are a lot of tools out there for creating online slideshows with your pictures.  Here is a neat site I found that is web-based and simple for students to use. Showbeyond allows you to make a slideshow with your pictures.  You can then add titles, captions, and audio with your slideshow.   To share your slideshow you can email it, share the link or embed it into your site.   Here is the slideshow I made:

Along with watching a ton of baseball games, taking classes at Cardinal Stritch and enjoying some time with my family, I have been busy reading books on my Kindle.   I wanted to share a neat site that allows a person to make a virtual bookshelf.  It is called Shelfari .   Shelfari allows you to keep track of books you are reading, have read and want to read.  It also has a place to rate each book and write a synopsis.  The other great thing about Shelfari is that you can share your bookshelf with others and see what your friends are reading.  I see a lot of potential for students to use Shelfari throughout the year to keep track of the books they read and to write book reviews.  You can embed your Shelfari into your blog as I have done below.   Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog If you start your own Shelfari please feel free to follow me and I'll follow you back.  Happy reading! <ul>&a...

Scholastic does it again!  Click here to go to their 50 one stop learning activities. They take between 15 - 30 minutes each and are geared towards K - 2nd grade, but seem appropriate for all elementary learners.  Areas covered include science, social studies, math, Spanish, and language arts.  To see all of the options for a subject area, click the subject area tab.  Click on "Spin it!" to spin the wheel and have an activity chosen for you.  There is a tab for grades 3 - 5, but it is not active yet.  

Cut My Pic is one of the easiest photo cropping sites I've found.  Just upload a picture and round the corners.  You can make a slightly rounded, very rounded or circular photo.  Save or share your picture.  I love easy finds like this one!  Here is a picture of my son, Ryan, and some of his friends I cropped and rounded the edges using Cut My Pic .  Share this with your students next time you are making a photo collage or doing project with photos.